I've been thinking a lot about EV-DO recently. Not because I'm using it.
Quite the opposite. I'm not using it. That's the way I've been thinking about it
-- just like a thick steak when you're hungry or that cute tennis player when
you're a love-sick teenage girl.
That's because I've been traveling - moving among three northeastern towns
ranging from happening Portland ME, to Binghamton, NY -- heartland of upstate
New York's economic disaster -- to Honesdale, PA -- a tiny town just
out-of-reach of the Pocono vacation crowd. In between I've been in several
airports.
One thing all these places have in common is difficulty finding free WiFi -- or
any WiFi for that matter.
Where there's WiFi, it's usually not free and, if you're on the move, involves
signing up with multiple providers. In San Francisco I could pay $8.00 to
AT&T for a day pass. Then, later in the afternoon, I could pay T-Mobile
another $8.00 for another day pass to get online in Philadelphia.
When I got to Portland, I was able to use the U. of Southern Maine's network,
but only because my friend is on the faculty.
Surprisingly, Honesdale, PA has two cafs offering free WiFi -- but one of them
doesn't allow users to send outgoing mail and both of them close at 7:00 p.m.
And, Binghamton, well all I need to tell you about Binghamton is that the only
place you can ship a package in Binghamton is the Post Office. Forget advanced
technology.
Now Philadelphia does have some free WiFi hotspots -- I'm writing this in one --
but the signal is weak and limited to a few (unmarked) locations. Performance
feels like a dial-up connection.
Between all these locations and access points, I could hardly manage to get my
email -- in the end I resorted to tried and true dial-up. Imagine trying to make
a VoIP call.
But while I was doing all this shucking and jiving to stay connected, my Sprint
mobile phone worked everywhere - even in the remote corners of rural PA.
Which brings me back to EV-DO. A while ago I wrote a piece on EV-DO after a
conversation with Erik Lagerway, SIPthat blogger and CTO of Shift Networks,
about VoIP over cellular data networks. A couple of people I spoke with for the
story poo-poo'ed EV-DO as too expensive, too limited. Ubiquitous WiFi was going
to make it a non-issue.
My report from the field is it's far from a non-issue. And that if staying
connected is important, right now EV-DO looks like a better bet.
